|
Iraq: ''We got nuttin'!''
The Iraqi government presented to the rest of the world Saturday ''Nope! Not us!'' Iraqi officials displayed the giant declaration, totaling more than 12,000 pages, to the international media at mid-afternoon. It was expected to be handed over to U.N. officials in Baghdad by late Saturday and flown out Sunday on a U.N. plane, to reach U.N. headquarters in New York and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna by late Sunday. The U.N. Security Council had set Sunday as the deadline. On a table in a government office, reporters were shown bound copies of volumes devoted separately to nuclear, chemical, biological and missile activities titled in English, "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declarations." The mass of paper, in volumes spread across the table, was accompanied by computer disks, presumably with additional information. A dozen Iraqi officials who worked on the declaration stood by, but refused to comment. It will be interesting to see how Sammy chooses to play this — we can't really predict, because prediction depends on either clairvoyance or analysis of a rational pattern of thought. With a run of the mill dictator, complete surrender would be out of the question, because it would lead to a bullet in the back of the head at some point down the road. But Sammy really could produce a full and complete accounting and ride it out; he's been painting the humiliating defeat he suffered in Gulf War I as a victory for the "Iraqi knights" since shortly after they surrendered to a helicopter flying over. He has the security and the propaganda machinery to bring it off. But since his love of weaponry is apparently a part of his makeup, he probably won't do that. Having enough there to keep arguing until spring is probably his tactic in this immediate case, which gives him time to work on breaking up the alliances we've formed. His impending address to the Kuwaiti people today probably says that's what's going to happen. Another course he could take — and we'll find out soon enough if he did — would be to publish the recipe for each and every weapon of mass destruction in his arsenal in those 12,000 pages with accompanying CDs, publish them or just let the UN do it, and open the entire Pandora's box of WMD worldwide — something similar to the blowoff in Animal House. Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2002-12-07 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=8288 |